The Street (25 page)

Ribald advice issued from the windows:

‘Aw, shut up! Folks got to sleep.'

‘What the hell'd you have in it, your rent money?'

‘Go on home, old woman, ‘fore I throw somp'n special down on your rusty head.'

As the woman's voice died away to a mumble and a mutter, the heads withdrew and the windows were slammed shut. The street was quiet again. And Lutie thought, No one could live on a street like this and stay decent. It would get them sooner or later, for it sucked the humanity out of people—slowly, surely, inevitably.

She glanced up at the gloomy apartments where the
heads had been. There were row after row of narrow windows—floor after floor packed tight with people. She looked at the street itself. It was bordered by garbage cans. Half-starved cats prowled through the cans—rustling paper, gnawing on bones. Again she thought that it wasn't just this one block, this particular street. It was like this all over Harlem wherever the rents were low.

But she and Bub were leaving streets like this. And the thought that she had been able to accomplish this alone, without help from anyone, made her open the street door of the apartment house with a vigorous push. It made her stand inside the door for a moment, not seeing the dimly lit hallway, but instead seeing herself and Bub living together in a big roomy place and Bub growing up fine and strong.

The air from the street set her skirt to billowing around her long legs and, as she stood there smiling, her face and body glowing with triumph, she looked almost as though she were dancing.

AFTER MIN hung the cross over the bed, Jones took to sleeping in the living room. He could no longer see the cross, but he knew it was there and it made him restless, uneasy.

Finally it seemed to him that he met it at every turn. Wherever he looked, he saw a suggestion of its outline. His eyes added a horizontal line to the long cord that hung from the ceiling light and instantly the cross was dangling in front of him. He sought and found the shape of a cross in the window panes, in chairs, in the bars on the canary's cage. When he looked at Min, he could see its outline as sharply as though it had been superimposed on her shapeless, flabby body.

He drew an imaginary line from her head to her
feet and added another crosswise line, and thus, whenever he glanced in her direction, he saw the cross again. When she spoke to him, he no longer looked at her for fear he would see, not her, but the great golden cross she had hung over the bed.

He turned and twisted on the sofa thinking about it. Finally he sat up. Min was snoring in the bedroom. He could almost see her lower lip quiver with the blowing-out of her breath through her opened mouth. The room was filled with the sound. The dog's heavy breathing formed an accompaniment.

It annoyed him that Min and the dog should be comfortably lost in their dreams while he was wide awake—painfully awake. He thought of Lutie's apartment on the top floor. It was like a magnet whose pull reached down to him and drew him toward it steadily, irresistibly. He dressed quickly in the dark. He had to go up and see if she was home. Perhaps he could get another look at her.

He went steadily up the stairs, his thoughts running ahead of him. This time he would tell her that he had come to see her. She would invite him in and they would really get to know each other. The stairs creaked under his weight.

There was no light under the door of her apartment. He hesitated, not knowing what to do. It hadn't occurred to him that she might not be home. He stared blankly at the door and then went past it, down the hall, and climbed the short flight of stairs to the roof. He stood looking down at the dark street, studying the silhouette of the buildings against the sky.

Gradually he began to discern the outline of a
whole scries of crosses in the buildings. And he crept silently down the stairs and into his apartment. He didn't undress. He took his shoes off and lay down listening to the sound of Min's snoring, and the dog's heavy breathing, and hating it.

He couldn't go to sleep. His mind was filled with a vast and awful confusion in which images of Lutie warred with images of Min. His love and desire for Lutie mixed and mingled with his hatred and aversion for Min. He was stuck with Min. He hadn't been able to put her out. Yet as long as she stayed he was certain he could never induce Lutie to come and live with him. He dwelt on her figure, etching it again and again in the darkness. She wasn't the kind of girl who would have anything to do with a man who had a wreck of a woman attached to him.

There ought to be some way he could rid himself of the fear of that cross Min had put over the bed. But though he thought about it at length, he knew he could never touch it long enough to throw it out of the house. And as long as it remained, Min would be here with him.

The living room had a cold, menacing feel. He kicked the patchwork quilt onto the floor and reached for his heavy work shoes, not turning on the light in his desire to hurry and get out of the room and go down to the cellar where there was warmth from the fire in the furnace. The glow from its open door would keep him company and finally lull him off to sleep as it had so many times when he stayed in furnace rooms.

One of the shoes slid out of his hands and landed on the floor with a loud clump. Min stopped snoring.
He heard the bedsprings creak as she turned over. He turned on the light and bent over to lace his shoes up, not caring whether she knew that he was going out. He thought of her with contempt. She was probably sitting bolt upright in bed, her head cocked on one side just like the dog's, trying to figure out what the noise was that had awakened her.

Outside in the hall he opened the cellar door and then paused with his hand on the knob when the street door opened. He turned to see which of the tenants was coming in so late and he saw Lutie standing in the doorway, her long skirt blowing around her. She seemed to fill the whole hall with light. There was a faint smile playing around her mouth and he thought she was smiling at the sight of him and bending and swaying toward him.

His hand left the door in a slow, wide gesture and he started toward her, thinking that he would have her now, tonight, and trembling with the thought. His long gaunt body seemed taller than ever in the dim light. His eyes were wide open, staring. He was breathing so quick and fast in his excitement, he made a panting sound that could be clearly heard.

Lutie saw the motion of his hand leaving the door, saw his figure moving toward her. She couldn't see who or what it was that moved, for the cellar door was in deep shadow and she couldn't separate the shadow and the movement. Then she saw that it was the Super. He was either going down into the cellar or just coming out of it. At first she couldn't tell which he was doing because his lank figure was barely recognizable in the dim light.

He was walking toward her. She decided he was
going into his apartment. When she started up the stairs, she would have to pass close by him and the thought filled her with dread. She saw again the tight, hard wrinkles in her blouse and thought of how he must have squeezed it between his hands. For a moment she was unable to move. Her throat went dry and tight with fear.

She forced herself to walk toward the stairs, aware as she moved that her gait was stiff and unnatural almost as though her muscles were rebelling against any motion. He wasn't going into his apartment. He had stopped moving. He was standing motionless in front of her. Somehow she had to pass him, get past him without looking at him, get past him now, quickly, before she thought about it too long.

He side-stepped and blocked her passage to the stairs. He put his hand on her arm. ‘You're so sweet. You're so sweet. You little thing. You young little thing.'

She could barely understand the words, for he was so excited that his voice came out thick and hoarse. But she caught the word ‘sweet' and she moved away from him. ‘Don't,' she said sharply. The street door was in back of her. If she moved fast enough, she could get out into the street.

Instantly his arm went around her waist. He was pulling her back, turning her around so that she faced him. He was dragging her toward the cellar door.

She grabbed the balustrade. His fingers pried her hands loose. She writhed and twisted in his arms, bracing her feet, clawing at his face with her nails. He ignored her frantic effort to get away from him and pulled her nearer and nearer to the cellar door.
She kicked at him and the long skirt twisted about her legs so that she stumbled closer to him.

She tried to scream, and when she opened her mouth no sound came out; and she thought this was worse than any nightmare, for there was no sound anywhere in this. There was only his face close to hers—a frightening, contorted face, the eyes gleaming, the mouth open—and his straining, sweating body kept forcing her ever nearer the partly open cellar door.

And suddenly she found her voice. Someone in his apartment must have opened the door or else it was open all the time. For the dog was loose. He came bounding toward them down the length of the dark hall, growling. She felt him leap on her back. The horror of it was not to be borne, for the man was trembling with his desire for her as he dragged her toward the cellar, and the dark hall was filled with the stench of the dog and the weight of his great body landing on her back.

She screamed until she could hear her own voice insanely shrieking up the stairs, pausing on the landings, turning the corners, going down the halls, gaining in volume as it started again to climb the stairs. And then her screams rushed back down the stair well until the whole building echoed and re-echoed with the frantic, desperate sound.

A pair of powerful hands gripped her by the shoulders, wrenched her violently out of the Super's arms, flung her back against the wall. She stood there shuddering, her mouth still open, still screaming, unable to stop the sounds that were coming from her throat. The same powerful hands shot out and thrust the Super hard against the cellar door.

‘Shut up,' Mrs. Hedges ordered. ‘You want the whole place woke up?'

Lutie's mouth closed. She had never seen Mrs. Hedges outside of her apartment and looked at closely she was awe-inspiring. She was almost as tall as the Super, but where he was thin, gaunt, she was all hard, firm flesh—a mountain of a woman.

She was wearing a long-sleeved, high-necked flannelette nightgown. It was so snowy white that her skin showed up intensely black by contrast. She was barefooted. Her hands, her feet, and what could be seen of her legs were a mass of scars—terrible scars. The flesh was drawn and shiny where it had apparently tightened in the process of healing.

The big white nightgown was so amply cut that, despite the bulk of her body, it had a balloon-like quality, for it billowed about her as she stood panting slightly from her exertion, her hands on her hips, her hard, baleful eyes fixed on the Super. The gaudy bandanna was even now tied around her head in firm, tight knots so that no vestige of hair showed. And watching the wide, full nightgown as it moved gently from the draft in the hall, Lutie thought Mrs. Hedges had the appearance of a creature that had strayed from some other planet.

Her rich, pleasant voice filled the hallway, and at the sound of it the dog slunk away, his tail between his legs. ‘You done lived in basements so long you ain't human no more. You got mould growin' on you,' she said to Jones.

Lutie walked away from them, intent on getting up the stairs as quickly as possible. Her legs refused to carry her and she sat down suddenly on the bottom
step. The long taffeta skirt dragged on the tiled floor. Bits of tobacco, the fine grit from the street, puffed out from under it. She made no effort to pick it up. She put her head on her knees, wondering how she was going to get the strength to climb the stairs.

‘Ever you even look at that girl again, I'll have you locked up. You oughtta be locked up, anyway,' Mrs. Hedges said.

She scowled at him ferociously and turned away to touch Lutie on the shoulder and help her to her feet. ‘You come sit in my apartment for a while till you get yourself back together again, dearie.'

She thrust the door of her apartment open with a powerful hand, put Lutie in a chair in the kitchen. ‘I'll be right back. You just set here and I'll make you a cup of tea. You'll feel better.'

The Super was about to go into his apartment when Mrs. Hedges returned to the hall. ‘I just wanted to tell you for your own good, dearie, that it's Mr. Junto who's interested in Mis' Johnson. And I ain't goin' to tell you again to keep your hands off,' she said.

‘Ah, shit!' he said vehemently.

Her eyes narrowed. ‘You'd look awful nice cut down to a shorter size, dearie. And there's folks that's willin' to take on the job when anybody crosses up they plans.'

She stalked away from him and went into her own apartment, where she closed the door firmly behind her. In the kitchen she put a copper teakettle on the stove, placed cups and saucers on the table, and then carefully measured tea into a large brown teapot.

Lutie, watching her as she walked barefooted across the bright-colored linoleum, thought that instead of tea she should have been concocting some witch's brew.

The tea was scalding hot and fragrant. As Lutie sipped it, she could feel some of the shuddering fear go out of her.

‘You want another cup, dearie?'

‘Yes, thank you.'

Lutie was well on the way to finishing the second cup before she became aware of how intently Mrs. Hedges was studying her, staring at the long evening skirt, the short coat. Again and again Mrs. Hedges' eyes would stray to the curls on top of Lutie's head. She should feel grateful to Mrs. Hedges. And she did. But her eyes were like stones that had been polished. There was no emotion, no feeling in them, nothing visible but shiny, smooth surface. It would never be possible to develop any real liking for her.

‘You been to a dance, dearie?'

‘Yes. At the Casino.'